Western liberal democracy is in crisis, but neither politicians nor pundits nor publics can agree on the cause. Is it too much democracy — “
populism
,” as we call it when we dislike the results? Or is it too little
democracy
, with popular expression marginalized by an ever-expanding “administrative state”?
America’s trust in its institutions declines, but its institutions continue to function as intended. The Electoral College continues to soften the blow of direct democracy. The Supreme Court continues to interpret the law, including whether the law is a static or dynamic system. Congress may have given up on debate, but it continues to rouse itself to pass laws and budgets. The presidency remains esteemed, even if its holders are unworthy of it.
EVERYONE WANTS TO BE A MODERATE, BUT POLITICAL REALITY HAS OTHER PLANS
The weak link in the chain of legitimacy is the party. The word “party” appears nowhere in the Constitution. A party is a mechanism, a piece of social and political technology. The party as we know it emerged in the late 18th century, like the steam engine. The party is a motor for the distribution of power within the liberal state. The fuel of popular energies is burnt off in the debating chamber. Those vapors of rhetoric are transformed into bureaucratic energy, and that is transferred back to the people.
The party, like the boiler of a steam engine, requires a series of complimentary mechanisms. A party cannot manage a liberal democracy without a literate public and a press free enough to dissent, a shared perception of the nature and uses of “ideology” (another 18th-century term), and a culture that permits both the aggregation of sectoral interests into coalitions and the acceptance of rivalry and defeat.
All these complimentary mechanisms have broken down. We tend to ascribe economic and technological causes. The balance of the global economy has shifted from west to east. Digital media have destroyed the gatekeeping role of analog media outlets, as well as their economic models. Partisanship has become unmanageable. All true, but not enough.
Parties are not failing because of these external pressures. They are failing because they solved the problems of 19th- and 20th-century mass democracy and then ossified around the solutions. Our parties developed to manage the conflict of capital and labor through the carrot and stick of taxing and spending. Over time, this task fused the major parties to the permanent bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the major parties of the West decoupled from their historic constituencies, at first through the external factors that caused deindustrialization in the 1960s and 1970s, and then, by way of compensation, through what the Marxists call “embourgeoisement,” the state-sponsored expansion of middle-class lifestyles in the 1980s and 1990s.
Democratic politics cannot be a contest between capital and labor if a managerial consensus has settled most of their dispute on the center ground. This was Western Europe’s post-1945 social contract. It is the contract that the Democrats have striven to create piecemeal since President Franklin D. Roosevelt and which the Republicans have accepted by degrees. The voters like it, but it substitutes the state for the party.
All political relationships tend toward that of patron and client. Our party model assumes that the voters are the clients and elected officials the patrons. In reality, the state is the patron — and in ways that reduce citizens to subjects. The current way to effect change is either to solicit the state’s favor by astroturfing a nongovernmental organization that speaks the language of bureaucracy or intimidate it by launching a mob into the streets.
Talking to your local representative no longer cuts through. Bureaucratic clientage has turned the party from a two-way distributor (opinions in, laws and rewards out) to a one-way distributor. The party secures and distributes rewards for its preferred constituencies. It blocks the other side from doing the same, exacerbating tensions between parties even as their family resemblance intensifies.
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As the voters lose influence over their elected representatives, the representatives are free to build alternative patron-client relationships with private interests. The party becomes privatized and factionalized. The voters become angry. The party is in an impossible bind. If it cuts state spending, it loses the public. If it cuts spending and increases efficiency, it intensifies its bonds with the bureaucracy. No wonder party membership is declining across the democracies.
There is no easy answer, only a hard reality. Market liberalism delights us by “micro-slicing” our affiliations and purchases, producing an environment mediated by the digital envelope. The same technologies have shredded the big coalitions on which big-tent parties depend. Smaller parties may be more representative, but they make for unstable and inefficient government. Stability and efficiency, though, already seem beyond the reach of the big party or the big bureaucracy.
